


Lies Are the Way We Grant Our Own Wishes

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 18:57:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16898121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: I can't disable commenting. If I could, I would. Please pretend that I have.





	Lies Are the Way We Grant Our Own Wishes

Betrayal on the bright face before his own on the battlefield.

But not surprise.

Disappointment, though, and Loki doesn't understand how Thor can be both unsurprised and disappointed.

The gold flash of hair as Thor turns to go.

A canary slipping out the cage door and flying off into the forest to live briefly and die proudly on honest branches.

Anger in the air all these years, obvious to everyone, though only Loki knows the cause - the king hidden in plain sight and forced to sleep.

Loki made Odin into his own monument. Glamoured him to look like granite and set him standing stock still in the queen's courtyard.

The ravens come and streak Odin's shoulders white with shit, but the birds never land on Loki, though he often wears Odin's image.

Loki keeps courting war, though he'd rather be courting his brother.

He has treated the two as synonyms so long now that he doesn't have to work too hard to suspend his disbelief.

It's better than being known, or so he says to his restless heart when it starts pacing to numb its starvation.

Easier to bear than the shame of being seen through so easily and completely that anyone could tell who Loki wanted with one glance.

The same one everyone wanted.

It made Loki feel so common. Dull. Cheap.

So Loki lied.

Said he didn't need the god of thunder any longer.

Didn't ache for the arms that had once held him fast.

That it was only a bit of fun to pass the time and Thor was a simpleton for thinking it could ever be anything other.

Loki would rather render everyone wrong than live rightly (and, even worse, obviously); there is no greater failing for a trickster god than transparency.

The more perfect Thor gets, the harder Loki pushes him away.

The twin ends of two magnets.

The more worthy Thor grows, the worse it all is and the greater the gap becomes.

Until they are nothing alike.

Opposites at last, and then the difference pulls them back together.

Only Thor tricks his brother.

Feints and fails to block the blade.

A nod to their history and a way to make them both the same.

Thor lets the momentum of Loki's spear complete its thousand-year-course, running him through as they fight in the muck from his storm.

Thor laughs as he falls and the rain stops with his heart.

Loki thinks it's an illusion at first, because that's what he wants it to be.

But then the red gets on his hands and the joke goes on too long and Thor's body is so heavy in Loki's thin arms - a child trying to carry a man, limbs slipping and tiring and shifting under limp weight that offers no assistance.

It feels like finding out your conjoined twin has cut itself free as you slept and crawled off to bleed out in the corner. Alone, the way all wild things wish to go, leaving you behind to die on bedsheets hot with blood that was never just yours.

A betrayal and a theft.

So now Thor belongs to Odin and his soul lives in that awful hall.

And whether a Frost Giant could ever hope to follow, Loki can't be sure.

Frost Giant or no, Loki knows he won't be going.

Life is one long sacrifice. He won't give more to realms that already take so much. Everything.

Won't buy his way into a paradise of someone else's making.

To wish to be king is to wish to be cruel.

Thor knew enough to know not to want it, while Loki thought Thor was a fool.

But now Loki sees that Thor was the only one with any wisdom.

And now Loki knows that he should have swallowed his bitter pride and hidden with his brother, someplace soft and harmless where they could fade off into age, slip away in their sleep, and go to Hel together unfettered by crowns and thrones.

There are spells, potions, and power, but they all come with risks and caveats.

The safest way to get Thor back is, simply, to ask.

So Loki wakes the sleeping Allfather.

There is amusement in the only eye now. As if it saw this coming all along and can finally stop waiting for the already-spoiled ending.

“It costs a soul to save one,” Odin says, before Loki's lips can come up with the question.

Always this impasse. Two sides of the same coin, setting themselves spinning in their quest to see to the other's face.

Live while he is dead, or die so he may live, but ever be without him.

The thought plays out on Loki's face until tears are falling freely.

Odin shakes his head and sighs.

“No father wishes to outlive his son,” the old king says, and he turns back into stone, but now the statue's eye is closed.

He didn't say which one.

Blue eyes blink up at grey clouds while fresh skin shines out from rent fabric.

Loki checks his brother's body for injuries three times and finds nothing amiss, over and over.

Old magic. Almost frightening.

Loki wonders what else has been lost.

“Who's the first man you kissed?” Loki whispers.

“You.”

“And the first woman?”

“You.”

“You knew it was me?” Loki breathes.

“You didn't know I knew?”

“What's the last thing you remember?”

“Laughing at you as your spear went through my middle.”

“And what were you thinking?”

“That it would be amusing.”

Loki frowns. He has broken something in his brother. Warped will to live into willingness to die, time and again.

“Perhaps we'll laugh later,” Loki offers.

Thor huffs and hops lightly to his feet.

Loki's arms feel mocked by how heavy the blond body had been to them.

They soothe themselves with subtraction: death must weigh a great deal.

Words come back to Loki slowly and when they arrive they are all lies.

Creature of habit.

Bolas spider.

He means to lure his brother back to him with the things Thor wanted but never had.

Loki knows them all.

History as Thor has long wished it.

“Do you remember that meadow between two rills where we spent a whole summer watching the grass grow?” Loki asks.

Thor hums, unsure of the game.

Two days later in a dusty library Loki tries again.

“Do you not miss our gardens? Walking the winding path between the beds on our way down to the sea and swimming until the sun sank into the waves.”

Thor nods and Loki thinks of it as a small victory for both of them.

At supper in Thor's room Loki sits so close beside his brother that their thighs touch.

“Shall we set our tent again in Alfheim's old forest and put its fauna in a panic with our panting?”

“Aye,” Thor answers softly, sure his hope stands on thin ice.

Night falls and Loki hasn't so much as glanced at the door.

When Thor's shirt hits the floor, Loki's follows.

“Shall we stay in here for weeks as we once did and send the servants running with our screams?” Loki asks, climbing into bed with his brother as though neither should think anything of it.

“Please,” Thor says, and sets a kiss to Loki's shoulder.

“May I stay this night and each one after?” Loki whispers, stepping naked from his nest of lies.

“Yes,” Thor says, and slips his arms around his brother.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I can't disable commenting. If I could, I would. Please pretend that I have.


End file.
